Motley Fool Blog Network

A few months ago I, like many people around the country, graduated from college full of hope and confidence, knowing that a prosperous career lay right in front of me. Scrooge McDuck-esque piles of money awaited me, and the world was sepia-toned and fancy free.

Of course I, like many people around the country, realized that getting a job is a lot tougher than it looks. To kill time between rejection letters from prospective employers, I began blogging for The Motley Fool, a site I’d often referred back to during my college career. The gig was easy; for $50 per post I could write to my heart’s content about any company of my choosing and The Fool would syndicate my work to sites like Daily Finance and Yahoo! Finance.

If only I’d started doing this back in college, I’d think. Imagine how nice that would’ve been—$50 per post can go a long way towards beer and pizza…I mean textbooks. Through The Fool’s syndication sites I could’ve gotten my name out there, and built a portfolio of work that would’ve gone great with all those resumes I’d sent out.

Now that I work at The Fool as a Blog Editor, it’s clear to me that the opportunity to write for a site like The Fool would have been invaluable back in college. Keeping this in mind, we here at the Blog Network have come up with a great way to get college students writing. Please allow me to introduce the first ever Campus Challenge!

A Call to Arms for the Battle of the Blogs!

The premise is simple; in order to encourage college students who are interested in finance to begin working in the industry, we’ve created the Campus Challenge. Any undergrad or graduate students who love investing will write for the Blog Network as part of a school team. Each team will be awarded points based on the quality of their posts, with bonuses for articles that are chosen as Editor’s Choice, among other commendations. At the end of the Challenge, three competitors will join Chris Hill and the Motley Fool Radio Show at American University’s Kogod School of Business to present their best investing ideas to the radio show team. At this final event, the highest scoring team will be crowned the Challenge Champions, and will win a fabulous Grand Prize!

So if you’re a college student looking for to way into the financial world, if you know a broke college student who knows how to invest, or if you’re a concerned parent who wants their kid to find a job and move out of the basement (like mine were), then this is the opportunity for you! The Challenge begins on January 22nd and goes until March 7th, which means you’ve got plenty of time to find some fellow students to blog with you. And don’t worry, even if you want to participate but can’t put together a team at your college or university, we’ll be awarding plenty of individual prizes throughout the competition.

Honor, glory, and riches await the best blogging team! For more information about the Campus Challenge, you can email blog@fool.com, or drop me a line at MReeth@fool.com. And if you just want to be a blogger, check out http://beta.fool.com/ and get writing!